Please use this thread to discuss the Archimonde encounter in Hellfire Citadel. As always, please specify raid difficulty when discussing strats - a Heroic tactic may be completely unfeasible in Mythic.

Definitely another Displacer beast fight for me, you want to be able to blink out of melee to deal with wrought chaos if it pops on you and the other person is out of position.

If you do the nether phase keep displacer off CD for when you finish, you want to blink out of the big fire aoe around where you pop out. On PTR you had to click a portal to get out but now it is automatic, meaning if you kill the nether boss guy at low HP you might die when you get out.

We ended up sending half of the DPS to each nether phase to get it killed quickly rather than run with a small group.

Yet another fight where damage on priority targets > padding. You may think it's a cleave fight, but Doomfires and Deathcallers are absolute top priority, while there's very little reason to have to push the boss himself except during phase transitions to beat another shadowfel burst or deathcaller spawn. So I would stack single target stats and PTFO. In phase 3, we should be cat form tanking infernals away from the infernal being focused. Put a lot of damage on it so that it'll die quickly when the tank taunts it and calls for target swap. The infernals are a soft enrage mechanic.

Kraineth wrote:A+ fight here for feral, lots of mid-hp adds that you can bleed up.

I completely disagree, I wouldn't call those adds mid HP at all. They are low HP adds but not "if we don't nuke this add into oblivion instantly we will all die"-adds, ergo its almost always (if not always) a bad idea to Rip these things which means our contribution is pitiful. I would just Rake the add when it spawns and then auto attack it as much as could, throwing in a thrash if I had the energy, Shred if I needed to Shred anyway, or an occasional bite if I didn't need the CP to refresh SR or Rip on the boss. I was literally last on priority add damage out of all of our DPS and got beat by one of our tanks.

We can certainly do more boss DPS than anyone else but that's partially because we prioritize the boss so highly since we're so poor at dealing with the adds. The frost DKs were close behind me putting them as clearly the best melee for the fight (as is the case with pretty much every fight), but I did about 40-50% more DPS than the rest of the melee. Our major (and I would say only significant) strength on this encounter is our tremendous boss burst damage in the burn phase which clobbers most other melee DPS.

Itharius wrote:Yet another fight where damage on priority targets > padding. You may think it's a cleave fight, but Doomfires and Deathcallers are absolute top priority, while there's very little reason to have to push the boss himself except during phase transitions to beat another shadowfel burst or deathcaller spawn. So I would stack single target stats and PTFO. In phase 3, we should be cat form tanking infernals away from the infernal being focused. Put a lot of damage on it so that it'll die quickly when the tank taunts it and calls for target swap. The infernals are a soft enrage mechanic.

Didn't seem like there was any reason to do this as melee, you're just gimping your damage when a ranged can do it instead. Its not like you have the freedom to move whenever you want in P3 so having the melee move infernals around seems like you're overcomplicating things.

After several hours on him last night (heroic) I agree whole heartedly. Unless we are allowed to go crazy on the boss with just off bleeds on the adds we are pretty bad on this fight. For us EVERYONE including me had to swap and do full damage on the priority adds (Doomfire -> Deathcaller -> Caster asshole I forgot the name of). The only adds I didn't have to hard swap too were the fel puppies. Because we weren't doing the "Kill your tank" strat it's a really rough P3.

An option you may want to explore for infernals is two hunters kiting separate infernals with distracting shot, work well for us. Third infernal stays on the boss. As feral, you only focus down the infernal in melee range (rake + ferocious bite, they don't live long enough for rip), tank taunts infernals to melee one by one.

Heroic: Arch is on farm but I always do subpar parses on this fight and not really sure what I should be doing at times. I don't really like being that player that looks to only improve damage and not fight execution but looking at high parses it seems that tunneling/boss dmg is one of the best ways I can help the raid. So I have a few questions on ways to improve damage.

Assuming I know how to use trinkets properly, is it better to use SC/Seed or SC/Mirror?
Should I only use finishers on Arch, and only throwing rakes and ooc thrashes on Doomfires and Deathcallers? or generate shred CPs on adds and use finishers on Arch? Letting soulcap do its work.
Should I be using BT'd thrash w/out OOC when Dreadstalkers first come out? If thrash is up and I get an OOC proc do I swipe?
Using Seed, when I have berserk up 2nd time and Dreadstalkers/Overfiend are up should I be swiping? Does this change if Soul Cap procs?

I'm pretty frustrated by this fight too and am looking for tips. Can someone confirm that all Nether Realm damage is being counted by a non realm logger?

We too are pressured to do hard swaps where in many cases even a Rake doesn't last it's full duration so I reverted to shredding and biting the add instead which helped a little. Our P4 infernals are all over the shop so I have to go chase them a bit.

We have it down on heroic but without being selfish I'm unable to be get my numbers much above 50k at 710. Will getting my 4p help much?

Grenache wrote:I'm pretty frustrated by this fight too and am looking for tips. Can someone confirm that all Nether Realm damage is being counted by a non realm logger?

We too are pressured to do hard swaps where in many cases even a Rake doesn't last it's full duration so I reverted to shredding and biting the add instead which helped a little. Our P4 infernals are all over the shop so I have to go chase them a bit.

We have it down on heroic but without being selfish I'm unable to be get my numbers much above 50k at 710. Will getting my 4p help much?

I think in general if a mob will last long enough for rake to tick even ONCE it is worth it to use rake instead of shred on it. The damage from rake application plus one tick is > the damage from a shred and it costs less energy too! Also bleeding it buffs your ferocious bite crit chance on it as well. Oh and to answer your question, yes 4 piece helps a ton. You'll have much more energy to work with when you have the 4 piece and you'll be able to get and keep thrash up on the piles of adds much more easily and get more ferocious bites in.

Just killed mythic this week so I figured I would post my thoughts/notes about progression. I feel I was pretty lucky to get into progression, this was likely due to the fact that my guild ended up running 3 mages and 3 hunters so the priority adds were getting smoked and my inconsistent and often low damage on them was often not an issue, so my A+ boss damage was the main reason I was brought.

I kind of typed this all up pretty fast, so if there are any specific questions just let me know.

I also couldn't find any videos from ferals who had already killed Archimonde so I'll link mine for reference:

Soul Cap: it is pretty crazy when you get good procs that you can blow up on things like Doomfire Spirits and Infernals, sometimes I had to /cancelaura it to get the benefit, but it was always worth it. On our kill our rogue and myself were in the top 4 on doomfire spirit damage with spirit eruption being 65% or more of our damage on them. This is inconsistent of course, and you should expect to be low on all but the very first spawn which I consistently hit for 800k-1million. Sometimes I tried to hit just the spirit with the explosion, but our spawns were always very close to the boss so I stopped bothering.

Seed: Phases 1 and 2 both have very key dps pushes that make the increased duration on berserk very useful. On our kill time (9:56) I got full usage out of 4 casts of incarnation and only wasted 10 seconds at the very end. Kill times can vary but I highly recommend this trinket over mirror. I didn't have a mythic censer to use but i very much doubt I would have used it.

Talents

Very standard here, the only recommendation I can make is mighty bash for overfiends and Infernals. Dogs/Infernals aren't affected by vortex or typhoon as far as I know.

Progression Notes

The first, and arguably most important push is the 85.5% push to spawn the first desecration, the timing for this is very important, you want to make that push right after the first cast of shadowfel burst, this causes him to delay the second doomfire by 10-15 seconds which allows the second and third doomfire spirits to line up fairly well with 30second and 1 min CDs, notable Tiger's Fury for us. At the beginning of progression we didn't know about this push and sometimes struggled to meet it until we stopped focusing the deathcallers in Phase 1 and left them to cleave (This includes the ring explosion, you definitely want the explosion to hit only Archimonde) After you get that push down P1 becomes pretty consistently easy.

Second Important push is getting to 40% and thus phase 3 before the 4th Wrought Chaos which also skips an additional deathcaller as well as a wave of dogs+Overfiend. Some guilds i've seen go into P3 with a wave at full HP, after getting this push down we never had to deal with that, every add was basically dead before P3 or a few seconds after we landed. This push usually means you need to hold the 4th shackles and not bother breaking them, the damage to the targets is pretty easy to deal with since there is no wrought chaos going off.

Hellfire Deathcallers

We started off progression by bursting these guys down in P2, and quickly changed to leaving them to cleave/ Hunters and Mages who we assigned. We even had tanks doing Doomfire in P2 and tank deaths during progression were fairly minimal. The only ones I bothered with in P2 was the first and last one, and even then I only put bleeds on them.

Phase 3

This phase is pretty much auto-pilot for melee, kill adds, do the dance, kill the boss. I was assigned to always kill the front right void star with some help from random people like the free tank + a mage. I thought it was a bad idea at first, but it allowed the rest of the melee to pool resources for Infernals, or not lose stacks of trinket buffs in the case of our ret and warrior. We ended up getting the kill the night we assigned me to a specific star by myself so it seems to have worked out just fine.

Worth mentioning that the front 2 void stars will never target melee first unless there aren't enough ranged players alive, so feel free to hover around where they spawn without fear of being targeted.

Aside from that, just practice getting on the very first add to spawn, every single circle that lands is an infernal, it isn't like heroic/normal where there are a ton of swirly effects and only a few Infernals, so If you see the first swirl to spawn, get to the edge of it and get on it. Outside of great Soul Cap proc timings you should expect to be quite low on them, but I did have a few pulls here and there were I was in the top 3 on them.

Last edited by Kraineth on Mon Sep 21, 2015 1:12 am, edited 1 time in total.

We had like 3 hours on this boss to try the first phase, and the notes you give here are going to be very useful for the nights to come. Plus, now I know that it's actually doable as Feral, and I may not be on the bench.

Also very recently managed a kill here and Kraineth's analysis is spot on with the timings in phase 1 and phase 2.

For the first kill would highly recommend saving tiger's fury and 5 combo points for the doomfires 2 and 3 in phase 1 and hopefully you'll get > 600k into it.

In phase 3, on our actual kill we played sloppy and wasted two brezes earlier in the fight and we were still able to beat the 5th set of infernals going nuclear by killing the first 2 crystals and sacrificing the rest (There is a small rock at the back of the room you can sacrifice your tank on and not waste raid dmg into killing the crystal.) In a more ideal attempt you could have all your brezzes and sacrifice all crystals and beat the 5th infernals easily by 20-30 seconds.

In phase 3 the 1st and 2nd set of infernals only spawn 3 of them and your group shouldn't have any trouble getting them down (maybe just rake and stun them and back on boss for feral).
The real dps check of phsae 3 is the 3rd set of infernals (4 of them) that spawn right after void stars. Everyone needs to go all out on those void stars and infernals and we even had our boomkin saving 3 minutes for them (and losing 1 of his uses of 3 min cds because of it).

There is a really poor timing mark that goes out as seething dance is still winding up right near the end. Rather than have people not in position fast enough (ruined a perfect attempt at 7% for us by blowing off both tanks) we have that first mark person sacrifice themselves when it happens during seething (the last or maybe 2nd to last mark of the fight).

Only just now reaching last phase on him. It's taken far too long but will be spending all 3 nights on him next week. I'm curious if you guys might have an estimate on how long you guys typically spent getting from the start of p3 to actually killing him?

Bluewulf wrote:Only just now reaching last phase on him. It's taken far too long but will be spending all 3 nights on him next week. I'm curious if you guys might have an estimate on how long you guys typically spent getting from the start of p3 to actually killing him?

Edit: By how long I mean wipe count

By the looks of it, once we got him to p3 "consistently", it took us about 60'ish wipes (including wipes where we just called it after 1 or 2 minutes because we knew we needed the combat ress or w/e).

The hardest part for us was figuring out how to do the 3rd and 4th Infernal waves. What we ended up doing was make people save CDs for the 3rd wave and combine it with pots. The 4th wave we would use the ring and blow them up as they land.

I'm assuming you have a plan for the Marks of the Legion already, which we fixed by using a raidwide WA on progress and we now use a home-made addon for (by me, not sharing it though )

Bluewulf wrote:Only just now reaching last phase on him. It's taken far too long but will be spending all 3 nights on him next week. I'm curious if you guys might have an estimate on how long you guys typically spent getting from the start of p3 to actually killing him?

Edit: By how long I mean wipe count

By the looks of it, once we got him to p3 "consistently", it took us about 60'ish wipes (including wipes where we just called it after 1 or 2 minutes because we knew we needed the combat ress or w/e).

The hardest part for us was figuring out how to do the 3rd and 4th Infernal waves. What we ended up doing was make people save CDs for the 3rd wave and combine it with pots. The 4th wave we would use the ring and blow them up as they land.

I'm assuming you have a plan for the Marks of the Legion already, which we fixed by using a raidwide WA on progress and we now use a home-made addon for (by me, not sharing it though )

Your guild must have been much more efficient, as another week goes by with no kill for me. Managed a 7% pull and then proceeded to wipe to p1 for an hour right after. I'll probably save my CD's like you mention for that third set as it looks like I won't miss out on a usage doing so. I think our boss mods have marks sorted, probably not as well as a good WA though.

well, so two different opinions on this.
When we did our first pulls today I tried censer/cap most oft the time and got the better results. Yet we still did not make it into the last phase, best try was around 48% I guess. Our other feral is sticking with seed though, so I have someone I can compare to. I really hope we can kill the dude in the coming IDs.